


no red carpet or yellow bricks

by raven_aorla



Series: we travel in twos (sustain your parallel) [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: F/F, Female Characters of Color, Femslash, Ficlet, buddhist!Vithya, hijabi!Dana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1197462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raven_aorla/pseuds/raven_aorla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's easier for them to talk in Dana's dreams. Bypasses the whole "celestial being with oddly-shaped mouths" issue.</p><p>Takes place before the events of "Walk". That's kind of the point, as you will see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no red carpet or yellow bricks

**Author's Note:**

> Not my characters. Jasika Nicole continues to be an amazing person.

"Hey, want some pumpkin halva?" 

Dana's concentration wavered and the spoon she was trying to bend into a mobius circle clattered to the table. "Vithya, it's Ramadan." Night Vale High School students fasting from both food and drink for religious reasons were allowed to spend P.E. indoors practicing their psychic muscles rather than their corporeal ones. The policy was instituted after Khaleel Kowalski dropped dead during a routine gladiatorial battle from dehydration in the hot sun, six years ago, though gladatorial battles in general remained a core part of the curriculum. Her best friend should know that.

Vithya wasn't dressed in a gym uniform, though. She wasn't a teenager.

She wore a Community Radio Intern uniform, instead, carefully laundered so that the stains from the previous intern hardly showed. "Erika taught me how to dreamwalk. Sorry to barge in. Erika said it can be disorienting, but Erika told Erika that Erika was being too fussy and it would make it simpler for me to chat, and Josie said that Erika was right and Erika was wrong and it might cheer you up." 

Right, a lot of stuff had happened since high school. At least that meant her dream-self would be able to kiss dream-Vithya rather than awkwardly inch closer to her and come up with weak excuses to touch her face and hands. Best part of growing up. Dana patted the chair next to her. "Then the halva won't be cheating. Thanks." The room they were in was sort of a locker room and sort of a lecture hall but also the basement of her cousin Tamika's house, with a dash of a toolshed's atmosphere, all at the same time. The furniture didn't seem to mind, even when they took up the exact same space in defiance of both physics and the principles of interior design.

Vithya placed the open Tupperware and plastic spork in front of her girlfriend, and instead of sitting in the chair she moved it aside, sat on the floor, and placed her head in Dana's lap. Like she did when she was sad, or tired, or pondering the existential underpinnings of the cosmos and her place within it. Her legs sprawled under the table but her arms wrapped around Dana's legs. "You fell asleep under one of my wings. And on top of two of the other ones."

"No wonder I feel safe." She tousled Vithya's dream hair and took a bite of the halva. Instead of a creamy texture and the crunch of nuts in a sweet paste, though, it tasted like toast and had the consistency of Jello with the occasional scrap of the specific caramel popcorn they had on their first date. It was unusual but pretty good.

"I might have gotten the flavor wrong. I'm forgetting what food is like. I'd always believed that if becoming a bodhisattva means becoming a being free of the cycle of reincarnation who stays behind to help people achieve the same thing...why do I want to know if I'm accurately imagining that squishy noise mac and cheese makes when you stir it?"

"You're supposed to have lost your ability to feel wrath and want and all those other negative things. I don't think being curious or nostalgic are negative things, Vithya." Dana took a sip from a glass of water that wasn't real and so had no obligation to have been present a moment ago. Dana could remember where the part in Vithya's hair was, though, finding it with her fingers among the black waves. "Are you able to tell me if I'm going home one day?"

Vithya said, "Kind of." She didn't seem inclined to add to that.

"You said - I remember it now, you said during the sunset, because you got to sit with me as it set this time and that was nice even if you're really quiet now, not like you used to be, I mean not now now but awake now - you said I was here so I'd be safe. As much as being out here to find whatever I'm supposed to find."

"There's a burning sun over Night Vale and the smiling god has knife-sharp teeth. You can't be found in the dusk." For a moment Vithya wasn't Vithya-shaped anymore. The next moment she was again. (That other being had Vithya within. The other things it had were just as loving and brave but too bright, too cold, too vast, so not Vithya. Even if kind enough to give her echoes.)

They were on a couch now, the one in the radio station break room, small plaques on the floor indicating where various past interns were buried. The ones whose bodies no longer existed or were inaccessible got a plaque to indicate where they _would_ have been placed for maximum symmetry. As in real life both Dana and Vithya were on the Chalkboard of the Missing rather than the Wall of the Deceased. Dana moved so they could subjectively cuddle. "You said I needed to get a good night's sleep because I need to get moving soon."

"Your phone will be all charged when you wake," Vithya said, wrapping an arm around her waist, an arm that was also a wing but was also an arm. "It doesn't have to be now."


End file.
